This piece is cross-posted from Payday Report, a website about the labor movement.
On Thursday, ICE raided a 3,000-acre “megasite” owned by a joint venture of the Korean automaker Hyundai and LG Energy, which is currently under construction near the port of Savannah, Georgia.
The plant had a notoriously bad safety record, with two workers, including one Korean, killed in preventable accidents in just two months this spring. The raid has raised major questions about working conditions and who should be held accountable for Hyundai’s alleged violation of labor laws.
The military-style operation saw hundreds of federal law enforcement cars and Humvees surround the auto plant site, where the Korean automaker had invested over $9 billion.
Over 450 workers were detained by ICE in the largest raid of Trump’s second term. Over 300 of those detained were Korean. Interestingly, both Hyundai and LG have stated that they did not directly employ any of the workers arrested at their facilities. They were all employed by subcontractors.
The ICE raid came as a shock, as South Korea’s left-leaning President Lee Jae Myung, who had visited the White House the week before, had touted Korean investment in facilities like Hyundai’s megasite in Georgia.
The reaction across Korea to the raid was outrage. South Korea’s largest newspaper, the right-wing Chosun Ilbo, led with the headline, “After Investing in ‘Trump MAGA,’ What Came Back Was the Arrest of 300 Koreans.”
President Lee pledged to do everything he can to ensure the 300 arrested Korean workers would be free. The South Korean government has offered to provide legal support for all those affected by the raid.
As our story went to publication, The Wall Street Journal announced that a tentative deal was in place to send the over 300 Korean workers home to Korea. However, the 175 other detained workers, predominantly Latino construction workers employed by Hyundai and its suppliers, will remain in federal ICE detention in Georgia.
“Hyundai personifies the Korean economy,” says Tim Shorrock, a veteran labor reporter and union organizer, who partially grew up in South Korea and has spent more than 45 years covering solidarity between American and Korean unions. “It’s by far the best known Korean corporation—this would be like Korea raiding GM in Korea and arresting U.S. execs and workers. Imagine the outcry from the U.S. if that happened.”
Workplace Deaths and Human Trafficking at Hyundai and Its Subcontractors
ICE is claiming that Hyundai broke federal labor laws by forcing Korean workers to work in dangerous conditions, resulting in the death of at least one migrant Korean worker.
According to the Korean news service Donga, a majority of the workers arrested were working in the United States on ESTA visas. ETSA allows foreign workers who are performing instruction or teaching workshops to work in the United States.
Under the terms of ESTA, foreign workers are not allowed to perform manual labor. However, most of the 300 Korean workers arrested at the plant were performing dangerous, hard manual labor.
“We welcome all companies who want to invest in the U.S., and if they need to bring workers in for building or other projects, that’s fine—but they need to do it the legal way,” Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Special Agent in Charge Steven N. Schrank said in a statement on Saturday.
“This was not a[n] immigration operation where agents went into the premises, rounded up folks and put them on buses. This has been a multi-month criminal investigation,” added Schrank.
On March 24th, Sunbok You, a 67-year-old construction worker, was killed when a forklift dragged him, and his body was severed in half, according to local station WTOC, which obtained footage of his death scene.
On May 21st, 27-year-old Allen Kowalski, an employee of a subcontractor, was killed when a load fell off a forklift, according to local station WSAV.
The two deaths led to high-profile investigations in outlets such as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Georgia Public Media, and The Current. Following the deaths, federal investigators, including OSHA, began scrutinizing the plant more closely.
“Based on what’s happened, there is a culture change that needs to occur on the project, and it doesn’t appear that it’s occurring,” a top Clinton-era OSHA official, James Stanley, the president of FDR Safety Solutions, told the Atlanta-Journal Constitution in July. The reporting focused on the Korean employers’ wide use of subcontractors that employed migrant workers.
Shortly after the raid, ICE announced it was opening an investigation into human trafficking at the megasite.
During previous Democratic administrations, workplace safety officials in federal courts routinely argued that “human trafficking” existed when an immigrant worker’s legal status was tied to an employer that was asking them to violate labor laws. Due to workers’ dependence on their employer for their immigration status and in violation of labor laws, workplace safety advocates have argued that such practices constitute “human trafficking.”
Shorrock says that he doesn’t necessarily trust the Trump Administration’s spin on the raid, but does say there is reason for concern if workers on ESTA visas were illegally forced into dangerous construction work.
“That’s a situation of exploitation,” says Shorrock, who says that unions in both Korea and the United States should be paying close attention to the working conditions at Hyundai’s plant.
Hyundai, the largest automaker in Korea, is notorious for using subcontractors to avoid workplace laws.
“These big companies like Hyundai rely on subcontractors for so much of what they do. The Korean economy is structured in such a way that subcontractors are common and, until recently, did not have the same rights as full-time workers at the parent company like Hyundai,” says Shorrock. “It’s really helped divide Korea’s workforce, and bust unions.”
Hyundai has faced various legal accusations in the past of forcing migrant workers to do dangerous work outside the scope of their visas.
In August, a federal judge issued a ruling allowing a lawsuit to proceed against Hyundai subsidiary Glovis Georgia and subcontractor GFA Alabama, brought by Mexican engineers.
The engineers claim they were brought into the country through the US Trade NAFTA (TN) visa program, which allows them to do professional work. However, when they arrived, they were assigned to non-professional roles, performing strenuous work on the assembly line and in the warehouse. The migrant workers were also paid $11 an hour, while colleagues made $17-18 an hour for the same work.
Hyundai has also faced scrutiny for its use of child labor. In 2022, Reuters won a George Polk Award when they exposed that four separate Hyundai supplier plants in Alabama were using underage immigrant children to do dangerous factory work.
Additionally, in 2024, the Department of Labor sued Hyundai and one of its subcontracted staffing agencies after a 13-year-old girl was found to be working 50-60 hours a week at the plant instead of attending middle school.
Hyundai has publicly claimed that it did not violate any labor laws at its facility. They have pledged to open a thorough investigation into subcontractors.
“We take our responsibility as a corporate citizen seriously, and incidents like this remind us of the importance of robust oversight throughout our entire supply chain and contractor network,” Hyundai said in a statement.
Following previous workplace deaths, Hyundai has dismissed subcontractors, yet the problems persist within the company.
The use of subcontractors that broke labor laws will likely shield Hyundai from any real legal consequences. Labor activists say that the federal government’s action penalizing migrant Korean workers for being forced to work in unsafe situations is the wrong approach.
Korean and American Unions Fight Back Against Hyundai
“When multiple workers have died during the construction of this very plant, the only federal action that could possibly be justified is to strengthen enforcement of occupational safety and health protections and other labor rights—a far cry from ICE raids,” said Georgia AFL-CIO President Yvonne Brooks in a statement sent to Payday Report.
Immigrants’ rights groups are rallying to defend the over 450 detained workers, including the 300 Korean workers.
“Our communities know the workers targeted are everyday people, who are trying to feed their families, build stronger communities, and work towards a better future,” said a coalition of two dozen Southern immigrant groups in a statement. “Hundreds of people abducted in the raids are now at the Folkston ICE Processing Center (FIPC) located in Charlton County. FIPC has a well-documented history of inhumane conditions and violations found by federal inspectors.”
Groups like Migrant Equity Southeast have pledged to help support and provide food and housing for the families affected by losing a family member.
“Right now, dozens of immigrant families across Coastal & South Georgia are facing uncertainty, fear, and urgent needs,” said the group in a Facebook post calling on community members for donations, support, and legal service assistance for those affected by the raid. “Together, we can ensure our community knows they are not alone.”
Shorrock, who runs the newsletter Empire Blues, which focuses heavily on Korea, says that media attention and investigations about what the workers were doing in Georgia will likely grow as the story dominates headlines back in South Korea.
“The anger is coming not only from the left in Korea and the government, but also going to come from the Conservative parties too,” says Shorrock. “This is seen as an attack on Korean workers and companies. It’s a national issue in Korea.”
The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, which has helped organize a series of roving strikes at Hyundai over subcontractor abuse in Korea over the past few years, has also denounced it.
After a 20-year battle, the union federation helped pass the Labor Union Act in August, which has extended union rights to Korean workers employed by subcontractors.
The Korean Federation of Trade Unions firmly denounced Trump for punishing immigrant workers employed by Hyundai and its subcontractors.
“To embrace us when investment is needed, then scapegoat us when convenient, is nothing short of gangster behavior,” said the union federation.
The UAW, which is seeking to unionize Hyundai in the South, released a statement condemning “Hyundai’s disgraceful record on worker safety … the militarized federal crackdown on these workers further hurts safety at Hyundai. Workers are not the problem. Exploitative corporations are.”
Shorrock says that now is a key moment for the labor movement globally to fight against these abuses. “I think American and Korean unions should be standing in solidarity against this kind of raid,” says Shorrock. “Trump is carrying out political warfare in these attacks on immigrants, and it affects all workers, Korean, Latino, everybody, and they should be standing up for workers in general. They get caught up in these kind of draconian ICE operations.”